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I’m currently reading Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (which is a book guaranteed to make creationists sob). By computer standards, the book is ancient – the computer he wrote it on had a memory measured in kilobytes. Nowadays, of course, that’s laughable.

But he still managed to get that wee little machine to sit up and do tricks. One of his tricks was the Weasel program. It’s a simple, elegant display of random mutation vs. random mutation with selection. It all had to do with monkeys writing Shakespeare, and the power of evolution to bring order from chaos. In just a few dozen generations, selection causes random mutations of letter strings to converge on “Methinks it is a weasel.” The need for infinite monkeys, time and typewriters is eliminated when you throw a little selection into the mix. It’s an outstanding tool for understanding how a little thing like natural selection combined with a bit o’ mutation can produce all the brilliant complexity life demonstrates.

This, apparently, has made creationists sob for over 20 years. In fact, William Dembski, hereafter more aptly named Dimski, just can’t let it go:

Over at uncommon descent William Dembski is musing over Richard Dawkins Weasel program. Why you may ask?

[snip]

Such is its power, the Issac Newton of Information Theory, William Dembski, spent a not inconsiderable portion of his time attacking this toy program. In particular, he claimed that after every successful mutation, the successful mutation was locked into place, and couldn’t be reversed. But he was wrong, and it seems he just can’t admit it.

As you can see, by using the Courier font, one can read up from the target sequence METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL, as it were column by column, over each letter of the target sequence. From this it’s clear that once the right letter in the target sequence is latched on to, it locks on and never changes. In other words, in these examples of Dawkins’ WEASEL program as given in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, it never happens (as far as we can tell) that some intermediate sequences achieves the corresponding letter in the target sequence, then loses it, and in the end regains it.

Selection strikes again! In the book, instead of plumping for 160 pages of gibberish, Dawkins presents us with every 10th fittest string. Dawkins even kindly provided the rules he gave the program. Someone who isn’t a complete Dimski can whip up a version for themselves, and watch the strings wander all over the place, even indeed losing and regaining target letters, before landing on the target sequence. Indeed, there’s even a BBC documentary in which Dawkins puts his program through its paces, and you can watch it happen.

A normal person would go, “Whoops.” Dimski screams “Conspiracy!”

That leads one to wonder whether the WEASEL program, as Dawkins had programmed and described it in his book, is the same as in the BBC Horizons documentary.

What a doofus.

So what does a Dimski do? Puts a “chief programmer” on the case:

In any case, our chief programmer at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.evoinfo.org) is expanding our WEASEL WARE software to model both these possibilities. Stay tuned.

Say what? How long does it take someone to write a program that basically takes a string, copies it with mutations, compares it to a target, chooses the best mutant, copies and mutates the new string, and compares again until the target is reached?

It is now 62 hours since William Dembski posted that the Evolutionary Informatics lab was going to try and reproduce Dawkins Weasel Program according to how it was actually written, as opposed to their fantasy version. In that time I’ve resurrected an elderly program, and several readers have made their own weasels from scratch. Commenter Anders has even made a Python version that puts “freely mutating” and “locking versions” head to head with great graphs.

Y’know, Billy Dim, I do believe it’s taking you so long because the program you’re trying to create never existed. Makes it rather hard to duplicate, dunnit? It’s kinda like trying to selectively breed for gryphons by way of proving all the myths are true.

This little dustup does demonstrate a rather powerful truth, although not the one Dimski intended. It’s really hard to produce scientific results backing up claims that are just flat-out wrong.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why IDiots haven’t managed any scientific proof yet, eh?

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Two posts, one on The Panda’s Thumb and one on Thoughts in a Haystack, explain brilliantly why creationists stubbornly stick to their pseudo-science in the face endless evidence debunking them mercilessly.

Once in a while an analogy comes along that deserves wide dissemination. I got one such this afternoon on the Ohio Citizens for Science list, and I’ve got permission to quote it from Joe Hern, its author. Joe was musing on the video of Michael Schermer interviewing Georgia Purdom, creationist geneticist at AIG. (I don’t know how long that URL will be good, so grab it if you want it.) Joe, who IIRC is a former YEC himself, captured the creationist mindset perfectly:

The psychology behind why Creationists seem to make up stuff that fit their theology is best understood by recognizing precisely how we feel when we see a magician pull a rabbit from its hat in a magic show. We do not need to know how it works to “know” it is not really magic. We do not entertain ideas that we may be ‘missing’ a step in our epistemology. We would roll our eyes at anyone who insists to us we are not thinking critically to accept that there may be true magic involved. The key component of this thought process is that we ‘know’ we do not have to look into it… it’s a foregone conclusion that there is no magic involved.

To the creationist, this is the exact same thought process. They ‘know’ God is real, that what he wrote is literal, and there is no reason whatsoever to even begin to entertain the idea that the ‘evidences’ for evolution are really evidence. It’s a foregone conclusion that such ‘evidences’, regardless how intellectual or damning they sound, are “simply” ways man makes data fit their own ideas, as Dr. Purdom stated.

[snip]

That really is what we’re up against: presuppositionalist thinking vs. evidential thinking, in Purdom’s terms. As I remarked in my AIG creationists on the jury post last week, for creationists evidence is not a means of testing presuppositions: evidence must be interpreted so as to corroborate them or one will fall into apostasy.

That being so, you can bet that when one of them starts to sound like they understand science, they’re going to veer off into IDiocy within a few seconds. Friend and fellow Elitist Bastard John Pieret has a perfect example:

Dr. Terry Mortenson, of Answers in Genesis, described as an “apologetics ministry” rather than a scientific organization, places science and the Bible in direct conflict:

“The Bible says the earth was created before the sun, moon, and stars — contrary to the big-bang theory. The Bible says that plants were created before sea creatures — contrary to…evolutionary theory,” Mortenson points out.

“And then the Bible says that there was no death before Adam’s sin — no animal death, no human death. But evolution says there were hundreds of millions of years of death in the physical world. So you have to ignore the details of the Bible to accept evolution.”

[snip]

Naturally, Mortenson claims that there is “an enormous amount of scientific evidence that supports that God created separate kinds of plants and animals … and there’s an enormous, massive amount of evidence in the geological record for Noah’s flood.”

But as we already know, that “scientific” evidence is evidence only if you ignore the “evidentialist approach” and, instead, adopt presuppositionalism by starting with the authority of the Word of God instead of with the “authority of human reasoning.” In short, there is scientific evidence for the biblical account if, and only if, you start by assuming the Bible is true. Besides the danger of his disappearing up his own butt running in such tight circles, Mortenson is being less than honest in not explaining that the “evidence” is not coming from actual evidence but from assuming his conclusion from the outset.

I’m not ashamed to admit that “disappearing up his own butt” gave me one of the most amusing mental images of my young life. Icky, but amusing.

Here we have the reason why they must be “less than honest.” Their religion doesn’t allow honesty. When you’ve painted yourself into the corner of Biblical inerrancy, and your entire worldview – your very idea of salvation – is predicated on that perfection, facts either have to be doctored or denied. There’s no other way out.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said something in his lecture that pertains here. When you memorize facts versus ideas, you’re susceptible to thinking the world is coming to an end when facts change. And that’s precisely where the creationists and IDiots are. Thus, presuppositionalism, and all of the antics that ensue.

All we can hope for is that enough evidence dogpiles on them to cause catastrophic cognitive dissonance, leading to a crop of ex-creationists. At least in the meantime, lookers-on learn a bit more science, and get to point and laugh as a bonus.

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It’s too bad I didn’t visit Lucy’s Legacy on the same day Casey Luskin did. Watching an IDiot ponder transitional fossils is almost as entertaining as watching Cons try to employ clever rhetoric. It’s even more enjoyable when people who know what the fuck they’re talking about get their hands on his burble and take him apart with gleeful precision:

I don’t know why I do it to myself. Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment and frustration. Every so often, I’ll feel the need to go to one of those Intelligent Design/Creationism blogs and get myself all angry and riled up. This morning I went over to Evolution News and Views and saw that Casey Luskin has been to the Pacific Science Center’s Lucy exhibit, and he’s soooooo not impressed. That’s okay though, because I’m not impressed with his critique.

Luskin says,

The first thing my friends and I noticed when seeing Lucy’s bones was the incompleteness of her skeleton. Only 40% was found, and a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments. Very little useful material from Lucy’s skull was recovered. (This seems to be common: many of the replica skulls of early hominids at the exhibit were clearly based upon extremely fragmentary pieces.) And yet, Lucy still represents the most complete known hominid skeleton to date.

I’m not sure if this is just a confusion of terms or just glaring ignorance, but Lucy is not the most complete fossil hominid known to date. Meet Nariokotome Boy. If you’re looking for complete skulls, let me introduce you to the Taung Child, Little Foot, Mrs. Ples, or KNM-ER 406. Or, open a book and introduce yourself to any number of the other skeletons that are comparatively or more complete than Lucy.

In the second section Casey tries to cast doubt on the bipedality of Lucy by quoting from a News and Views article by Collard and Aiello. The Collard and Aiello article reports on a “letter” to Nature by Richmond and Strait called Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. In that paper Richmond and Strait claim to do two things. First they provide evidence that Australopithecus anamensis and A. afarensis both share wrist morphology indicative of knuckle-walking. They then argue that knuckle-walking is a synapomorphy that links the African apes and humans. Once upon a time, and not all that long ago, the relationships between chimps, gorillas, and humans was considered an unresolved trichotomy. Quite a few people argued that chimps and gorillas were more closely related to each other than either was to humans. Others argued, based on morphological and genetic evidence, that chimps and humans were more closely related. Richmond and Strait’s results took away a crucial piece of evidence for the gorilla-chimp clade. Casey, having “…studied about Lucy and other fossils…” doesn’t mention any of this. Of course, if Lucy really is the commingled remains of who-knows-what as Casey argued above, then none of this matters and one has to wonder why Luskin goes futher. But he does. Says Casey:

Lucy did have a small, chimp-like head, but as Mark Collard and Leslie Aiello observe in Nature, much of the rest of the body of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was also “quite ape-like” with respect to its “relatively long and curved fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest.”

Given that Luskin is dedicated to exposing the misreporting on evolution, I’m sure you will be shocked as I am to find that this is only kind-of sort-of what Collard and Aiello said:

The basic facts are not in dispute. A. afarensis has a combination of traits that is not seen among living primates. In some respects, A. afarensis is quite human-like (for instance in the foot structure, nonopposable big toe, and pelvis shape). In others, it is quite ape-like (relatively long and curved fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest).

My goodness. An IDiot twisting the scientific literature to suit his own purposes? Say it ain’t so!

One day, for shits and giggles, I’m going to take a field trip to the Discovery Institute with a sack full of science journals and ask them for their peer-reviewed contributions to science. I’ll ask for their original fieldwork, their dramatic finds, and Nobel Prize-winning research. They’ll try to hand me Luskin’s lunacy and Egnor’s ignorance, because it’s all they’ve got. And that’s their only contribution: in being such ignorant fuckwits, they allow actual scientists to shine in the rebuttal.

I’m discovering that you can indeed learn a lot from a dummy, because the smart people have such fun taking them apart.

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First, the setup: AC Grayling, writing brilliantly in New Humanist, took Steve Fuller to the woodshed over his obnoxious little book Dissent over Descent. You know someone’s not impressed with your efforts to give ID a little boost when they entitle their review of your book “Origin of the specious.” Fuller, of course, responded by whining incessantly. Grayling, seeing he had not fully absorbed the lessons of the woodshed, took him out back for a second round, this time employing a prototype Smack-o-Matic 4000 that I desperately want to lay my hands on. Beautiful mayhem ensues.

I want to highlight one paragraph that captures the essence of what science is and ID isn’t. If Intelligent Design were a person, what follows would qualify as a debilitating towel-snap to the nads:

I am, says Fuller, ignorant (sheerly so; this is the glaring deficiency in my case) of “ID’s argument structure”, which is – argument to the best explanation! Oh pul-eese! I ignored this bit in my review out of a kind of residual collegiality, for even among the toxicities that flow when members of the professoriate fall out, embarrassment on others” behalf is a restraint. But he asks for it. Argument to the best explanation! Look: there is a great deal we do not know about this world of ours, but what is beautiful about science is that its practitioners do not panic and say “cripes! we don’t understand this, so we must grab something quick – attribute it to the intelligent designing activity of Fred (or Zeus or the Tooth Fairy or any arbitrary supernatural agency given ad hoc powers suitable to the task) because we can’t at present think of a better explanation.” They do not make a hasty grab for a lousy “best explanation” because they have serious thoughts about the kind of thing that can count as such. Instead of quick ad hoc fixes, they live with the open-ended nature of scientific enquiry, hypothesising and testing, trying to work things out rationally and conservatively on the basis of what is so far well-attested and secure. What looks like having a chance of being both an “explanation” and the “best” in a specific case turns on there being a well-disciplined idea of “best” for that specific case. But an hypothesis has no hope of becoming the best explanation (until a better comes along) unless it survives testing, is specific, and is consistent and conservative with respect to much else that is secure. This is a far cry from the gestural “best explanation” move that ID theorists attempt, which – and note this carefully – does not restrict itself to individual puzzles only, but applies to Life, the Universe and Everything. It has to, at risk of incoherence; and yet by doing so, it collapses into incoherence.

Oh, snap!

I think I’m going to have this paragraph printed on little cards. Why waste my breath with IDiots when I can simply hand them the card, watch them read it, and then grin as they splutter?

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Science and science education have a few friends on the right. Not every conservative is a demented fuckwit pandering to religious frothers, or a willfully deluded ostrich burying their head in the sand of Intelligent Design. Some, in fact, actually respect science, and don’t like to see religious dogma masquerading as “scientific theory” mucking it all up.

I nearly missed it, but he rose to the defense of science again when LA Gov. Bobby Jindal was about to sign that noxious “academic freedom” bill into law – and he’s just turned Bobby over his knee for a sound spanking for actually putting pen to IDiot bill:

The creationists have pulled off their little stunt once again, and Bobby Jindal has been their patsy. I know there is a pro-Jindal factor among my colleagues here on The Corner, and I’m not stepping on toes for the fun of it. I must say, though, I can’t see voting into national office a guy who is duped as easily as this into acting against his voters’ interests.

Boy, is Bobby’s butt red. And how does the bill itself fare?

Whether or not the law as signed is unconstitutional per se, I do not know. I do know, though — as the creationist Discovery Institute that helped promote the Act also surely knows — that the Act will encourage Louisiana local school boards to unconstitutional behavior. That’s what it’s meant to do.

Some local school board will take the Act as a permit to bring religious instruction into their science classes. That will irk some parents. Those parents will sue. There will be a noisy and expensive federal lawsuit, possibly followed by further noisy and expensive appeals. The school board will inevitably lose. The property owners of that school district will take the financial hit.

Not too good.

And now that he’s brought up DIsco, let’s see if they get turned over a knee:

Where will the Discovery Institute be when these legal expenses come due? Just where they were in the Dover case — nowhere! What, you were thinking that those bold warriors for truth at the Discovery Institute will help to fund the defense in these no-hope lawsuits? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Helping to defend creationist school boards in federal courts is not the Discovery Institute’s game. Their game is to (a) make money from those spurious “textbooks” they put out, and (b) keep creationism in the news so that they don’t run out of lecture gigs and wealthy funders. So far as those legal bills are concerned, Discovery Institute policy is: Let the dumb rubes fund their own stupid lawsuits.

And here I thought we were good at spanking DIsco. Damn!

Once more, Derbyshire earns himself a free round of drinks at the cantina. He and I don’t agree on a myriad of subjects, but on this we are in perfect accord: these anti-science con artists need to be run out of town. And we do not need to be voting creationist dupes into office.

Now, where are the rest of the conservatives like him?

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A few days after letting Kathleen Parker drool homophobic bullshit all over their editorial page, the Washington Post attempts to redeem the place with an exposé of what Academic Freedom Bills are really all about:

What’s insidious about these measures is that at first blush they appear so harmless. Isn’t everyone in favor of academic freedom? What’s so wrong about allowing all sides of an issue to be heard? Why should teachers be punished for speaking their minds? Those arguments might have standing if there were any doubt about the reality of evolution, but, as an official with the National Academy of Sciences told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s no controversy.” Consider, also, that there really is no such thing as academic freedom in elementary and secondary education. A teacher can’t deviate from the accepted curriculum to present alternative lesson plans or to offer his or her own notions. The Florida teachers association opposed the bills, though ostensibly they are meant to benefit educators. Clearly, the strategy is to devise an end run around legal decisions — going all the way to the Supreme Court — that restrict the teaching of creationism in public classrooms.

All right. For such clear-eyed reporting on the sneaky neo-Creationist efforts to smuggle their pious non-science back into science class, thee shall have a cookie. And you’re allowed to sleep on the couch. But I’m warning you, Washington Post: one more right-wing fucktard editorial, and it’s right back to the doghouse without supper for you.

Lots of people have reviewed Expelled. To some the movie has served to confirm their persecution complexes; to others the movie has demonstrated the utter dishonesty of the anti-evolution movement. But here comes Thomas Robb, national director of the KKK (and a Baptist minister), with a thoroughly unique take on the movie: it was made to encourage race mixing. No, I’m not making that up. He begins by pointing out that Ben Stein is a Jew and that he has “set a trap”:

Is the person who puts out the cheese, carrot etc a friend or are these things being set out to entice and to trap a victim. So Ben Stein has set a trap in the form of a movie to catch Christians and destroy their resistance to race-mixing.

Wow, Mark Mathis et al were really clever buggers. They so had us fooled! Good thing we have Thomas Robb, the original Sharp Tack, to reveal the true aim of Expelled! [/sarcasm]

Not only were we wrong about Expelled being about icky Darwinism and stuff, we’ve been wrong about ID all this time, too. Wow. Here we thought it was a tarted-up version of creationism, and Expelled was out there to topple Big Science and stuff, but it’s really something else entirely:

Now it seems that it may be politics. According to the attorney representing the producers of Expelled in the Yoko Ono suit seeking to remove John Lennon’s song “Imagine” from the film:

[Anthony T. Falzone] said an adverse ruling by [U.S. District Judge Sidney] Stein would mean “you have muzzled the speech of my clients” because they would have to replace the song with other images, losing the chance to make the issue important enough that it could even influence the U.S. presidential campaign.“If you issue that injunction, you trample on these free speech rights and you put a muzzle on them and you do it in a way that stops them from speaking on this political issue leadingup to the election,” Falzone said.

I think my favorite part of Falzone’s snivelling was the idea that losing 25 seconds of a pilfered song would mean the difference between Expelled dying a quiet death and Expelled becoming the vehicle propelling ID front and center in the presidential campaign. Who’da thunk John Lennon had such power?

The movie is dead anyway, so it doesn’t seem to be a significant decision. It’s not as if theater distributors are lined up clamoring for more copies of this stinker. Although, to be honest, I would like the rights cleared up, because the only way I’m ever going to see it is if I can rent the DVD from my local store.

Does anyone else get the sense that this movie’s only got life left in it because there’s still a few drops of entertainment at its expense left to be squeezed?

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It’s been a long time since Expelled hit the theaters and failed spectacularly to deal a death-blow to evolution. It didn’t give unstoppable momentum to various AcademicFreedom bills. It didn’t topple Michael Moore’s documentary throne. Rather than further its agenda, it managed to make itself a laughing-stock amongst all but the most deluded of the IDiot crowd.

Stein joins an odd political/religious coalition in taking the measure of the 21st century and deciding that our biggest problem is that we have too much science and too little religion. As American children fall further behind in the classroom, and the United States relinquishes its reputation for technological innovation, perhaps only an economist like Stein can explain how it is in our country’s benefit to mock the fundamental biology upon which our understanding of the natural world relies.

Yeah, Ben. How will IDiocy benefit America? Or was this really your nefarious plan all along?

How to Ruin American Enterprise12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism–and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women–to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.

Everybody read that 2002 Forbes article as sarcasm, but in light of what he’s done lately, methinks it may have been more of a roadmap.

So how are his efforts to “elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism…to an equal status with technology in the public mind” going? Ouch:

TOTAL LIFETIME GROSSESDomestic:$6,906,488

Not too good for a movie that proclaimed it would make $15-20 million in the opening weekend.But how’s the theatre count? There’s still a chance… isn’t there?

A federal judge in Manhattan has told the makers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed that they cannot distribute the film any further, until a copyright infringement complaint is heard in court later this month.

“Cannot distribute the film any further…” I suppose that means a swift DVD release is right out, then.

“Expelled” is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word “expelled” may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

Matters are further confused by the fact that the film never acknowledges that some ID theorists actually believe in evolution, albeit perhaps only to a point.

Instead, the film allows the viewer to think that ID and evolution are natural enemies – an idea deepened by the film’s efforts to link Darwinism with the Holocaust.

The problem is, evolutionary theory – which is both older and newer than Darwin, by the way – is either true or it isn’t, and it doesn’t matter much whether people have abused the theory, any more than it matters whether people have abused, say, the teachings of Jesus. Within the film, Dawkins links the Bible to genocide just as surely as Stein links evolution to genocide, so what good does that tactic really do?

In Reasons To Believe’s interaction with professional scientists, scientific institutions, universities, and publishers of scientific journals we have encountered no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect. As we have persisted in publicly presenting our testable creation model in the context of the scientific method, we have witnessed an increasing openness on the part of unbelieving scientists to offer their honest and respectful critique.

Our main concern about EXPELLED is that it paints a distorted picture. It certainly doesn’t match our experience. Sadly, it may do more to alienate than to engage the scientific community, and that can only harm our mission.

All of this jabbing Expelled in the eye with their own log of stupid has been delightful, but things are slowing down to a trickle. That’s why I hope Ono’s suit is settled quickly, so that we can enjoy a reprise of the fuckery when the Expelled DVD is released. I’ll bet you a million dollars to a donut hole their bonus features include something stolen, blatantly copied, or breathtakingly dishonest.